Bartholomew's Notes

A couple of weeks ago Israeli newspaper Maariv International reported on a therapeutic visit to Israel for Beslan survivors:

Thirty-eight residents of Beslan, including 18 children who survived the school carnage in the town, arrived this (Sunday) morning at the Haifa Port and will be guests of the city of Ashkelon in the next three weeks.

The initiators of the visit, city mayor Roni Mahatzari [of Ashkelon] and Moshe Mano of “Mano Shipping”, have expressed hope they would be able to provide their guests with three weeks of great experiences that would hopefully help them deal with their tragedy…The City of Ashkelon, the Even Ezer Foundation and the Organization of Olim from the Caucuses financed the trip.

And what “great experiences” are on offer? Maariv does not say, but some rather unexpected details that are reported on ASSIST, courtesy of an interview with Pastor Bradley Antolovich. Antolovich is the head of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem, a Messianic Jewish congregation that is also part of part of Chuck Smith’s Mesa-based neo-Pentecostal church grouping. Antolovitch has visited Beslan to undertake humanitarian work, and is not one to pass up on an evangelising opportunity:

“Although our return trip to Beslan was delayed, the Lord arranged for eighteen children who survived the massacre (along with their families) to visit Israel this week!”

Over the next two days, these families will be touring Jerusalem, visiting primarily Christian sites, Antolovich said.

“The Lord has blessed For Zion’s Sake [a Calvary Chapel Ministry] with the means to sponsor their tour, provide a believing tour guide fluent in Russian, and see that they are accompanied by Russian-speaking believers from our congregation.

…”The families will be joining us here at the fellowship for lunch and children’s worship. Each child will receive a gift and a Russian Bible. The day will end with a visit to the Garden Tomb where we will bring the gospel message and invite all to receive Christ!”

The Garden Tomb was the tomb of Christ “discovered” by General Gordon during the nineteenth century, and is now run by British Evangelicals. Most Russians will be more familiar with the far more ancient site of the Basilica of the Anastasis (known in the west as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). But the question is: are Israeli organisations so desperate to keep in with Christian Zionists that they are willing to hand over traumatised Russian children to be converted to Charismatic Protestantism?

More details on Bradley Antolovich can be found here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

David Aaronovitch is a liberal hawk, but one who manages to avoid the bombastic rhetoric and sometimes wilful misrepresentations of opponents that one finds in the work of his fellow Brit Christopher Hitchens. For his pro-war views, and for attacks on Islamic fundamentalism, he has received a certain amount of abuse (some of it anti-Semitic) from Islamists and others. His latest Guardian piece looks at Submission, the short film that recently led to the murder of its director, Theo van Gogh (which in turn appears to be doing a good job of turning the Netherlands into 1970s Northern Ireland). Aaronovitch is appalled as the rest of us by the murder, but he is also troubled by the film:

What the film suggests is that, somehow, domestic violence and rape are linked to specifically Muslim ways of seeing the world and the relationship between men and women. Given the fact that the film is made by a non-Muslim (indeed, by a noted critic of Islam), the effect is disturbing. What is the film-maker’s intention? Who is the film aimed at?

Imagine a similar film being made here featuring Lubavitcher Jews and suggesting the plight, say, of a child in a closed community. The child might talk about paedophilia in one of the many unregulated weekend classes, about the code of silence, all set against the background of a seven-branched candlestick, with the words of the Torah passing across her body. Then suppose it was made, not by a Lubavitcher, but by a rightwing member of the Conservative party, who had once called a Jew, a “Christ-killer”, as Van Gogh once described a Muslim as a “goat-fucker”.

…The story of Muslims is of a backward, super-sensitive religion which mistreats women and suppresses dissent. It is as true and as useful as the story of Jews, and, if we keep on telling it, leads to a similar place.

I would agree with Aaronovitch’s analysis – and it also reflects why I find sites like JihadWatch and Little Green Footballs so distasteful, despite the need to expose Islamist fundamentalism unapologetically. But there is something more going on here. Submission was not just made by a non-Muslim, as Aaronovitch claims: the script was provided by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim of Somali origin. Ali’s forthright rejection of her religion makes me recall Ibn Warraq, the ex-Muslim who works for the secularisation of Islamic society. However, Warraq attacks not just Islamists and, as a secularist and rationalist, Islamic doctrines, but also the memory of Edward Said. Ibn Warraq’s name is somewhat deceptive: it is a pseudonym, and he is in fact of South Asian origin; neither he nor Ali are Arabs. Could it be that these undoubtedly brave and important figures are not just determined to free society from the Islamic confines that blighted their early lives, but are also motivated by animus against the Arabs who brought the ideas that so oppressed them?

Meanwhile, in the USA the racist commentators at LGF and JihadWatch are far more prone to identify the Muslims they so despise as Arabs, rather than (say) Malaysians or Turks (the obvious reasons for this does not excuse it); Jack Wheeler can call Arabs pederasts at WorldNet Daily without causing controversy; Mike Evans can create a best-selling Biblical exegesis that claims the very creation of the Arabs was against God’s will. While Aaronovitch sees “domestic violence and rape…linked to specifically Muslim ways of seeing the world” in Submission, I wonder if in fact we’re supposed to think of domestic violence and rape as linked to the Arab man?  Jeff Sharlet recently wrote that Muslim-hating has become mainstream. But perhaps it is anti-Arab racism that is making the strongest strides.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

As the debate over the influence of religion in American public life rumbles on, Europeans ponder similar issues. Writing recently in The Guardian, Peter Preston observed:

I happened to be in Malta last week, discussing the case of Rocco Buttiglione in a university lecture theatre. Malta, number 25 on the EU membership list, not only doesn’t have abortion, it doesn’t have divorce either. (Its new Brussels commissioner was hugely relieved to get the fisheries brief; he’d probably have taken bread as well.)

Not far from the university, on the other side of the Grand Harbour, stand the great bastions where the Knights of St John held sway; and the order’s churches seem to dominate every street in Valletta. They are part of all our history, of a crusading Christian Europe militant to defend Jerusalem and spread the word by force of arms.

This history hasn’t ended. Not, of course, in the great balloon of al-Qaida that dogs every policy. Not in Bosnia or Kosovo, as Islam and Christianity fail to coexist. Not in Cyprus, north and south. Not between faiths in Northern Ireland. Not when Turkey’s EU membership is on the table and the opponents talk “Christian Europe”. Not when the charge against Buttiglione is led by German MEPs dubbing him “an acolyte of the Pope”. Not when mainstream conservatism in Strasbourg – the one that excludes our Tories – is Christian Democrat.

Since being obliged to withdraw as a candidate for becoming an EU Commissioner, Buttliglione has emerged as the leader of a movement dubbed by the media as the “theo-cons” (it’s not clear if that is a word he uses himself). According to The Tablet (a reliable source), Buttligione would appear to have been shafted by secularists:

Buttiglione was widely reported as describing homosexuality as a sin. In fact, he told the parliamentary committee vetting him: ‘Many things may be considered immoral which should not be prohibited. I may think that homosexuality is a sin, and this has no effect on politics, unless I say that homosexuality is a crime.’

The word ‘sin’ does not belong in the political sphere, he said. It was his questioner, not Buttiglione himself, who first used the word. For politicians the problem was discrimination, not sin, and Buttiglione was ’emphatically against discrimination’.

Speaking at Milan’s Teatro Nuovo, Buttiglione declared that in the eyes of the EU Parliament he was a “Catholic witch” to be burned, and he vowed to “battle for the freedom of Christians”. According to the BBC, Buttiglione was endorsed at the event (described as a “debate” for some reason) by Giuliano Ferrara, a former spokesman for Silvio Berlusconi, who said that

there is a cultural war happening which has to be fought with force and virtue

Ferrara is an ex-communist and, according to AGI, is a “devoted atheist”. He edits Il Foglio, a small-circulation newspaper, and wrote an editorial on the Buttiglione decision entitled “Out with the Christian, in with the Freemason”. The Tablet also adds:

Buttiglione has taken heart from the re-election of George W. Bush as President of the United States. Evangelicals and the majority of American Catholics have resisted the individualism that is the legacy of the culture of the Sixties and Seventies, he says. They have instead affirmed the idea of the family. The Democrats, he believes, have been perceived as a party without a soul, believing in minority rights but with no ideas for the majority. The choice for Europe, he thinks, is to go the way of America at least in its rejection of secularism, or to decay.

Meanwhile, British Evangelical theologian Alister McGrath has a new book out, The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, in which he argues that religion is making a come-back globally. According to a review in The Toronto Star:

In spite of dire declarations that God had died, there has been a phenomenal post-modern, global religious resurgence. Evidence of a change is reflected in popular New Age “spirituality,” for example; or the global rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. There has been a revival of Orthodox Judaism, and significant growth in militant Islam…In post-atheistic Russia, for example, there has been a remarkable rebirth of religious interest…Atheism foundered on the shoals of rigidity and orthodoxy; two of the very elements it had rejected in religion.

But, I have to ask: what does all this mean? Yes, secularists in continental Europe, whether from the Left or the libertarian Right, are often somewhat heavy-handed, for historical reasons (the UK is different), but does the fact that Buttligione made a speech in a theatre constitute a consequential backlash? Yes, the socio-cultural phenomenon of postmodernity allows more room for identity politics, which brings in religion (seen most dramatically at the moment in the Netherlands), but how far does that impact on the organisation of European society as a whole? “New Age” spirituality appeals to a few middle class people, but not enough that adherents are prepared to give their lives over to its advance; the Pentecostal and Charismatic revivals have slowed the decline of Protestantism, as Protestants switched from dour Baptist churches and the like, but since its hey-day in the 1980s demand has peaked (see books by Steve Bruce); the fact that a peasant society that not so long ago venerated pictures of Stalin and Lenin has turned back to its icons is less than surprising.

McGrath’s reviewer (I haven’t been able to see the book itself) also makes the mistake of tracing atheism to various intellectuals: the usual suspects of Voltaire, Fuerbach, Marx, Freud and Darwin. But this ignores the real engine of secularisation, which is modernisation. The EU constitution has no religious reference points, not because its drafters have deferred to non-believing intellectuals, but because it is a managerial and bureaucratic document. High-blown rhetoric, whether religious or idealistic in any other way, just sounds silly in such a context. Of course, the matter of religion in public life is not completely settled, although it is more so than in the USA, where a culture of populism trumps the church-state divide. Most people in Western Europe, for example, take the view that what science consists of should be determined by scientists, rather than by religious lobbies working with politicians. The “individualism” Buttiglione objects to may have its unattractive elements, but what exactly does he propose as an alternative? I fail to see how the USA has “affirmed the idea of the family”, although I understand that banning the minority of people who wish to marry a member of their own gender from doing so is supposed to assist the family in some mystical way.

You can call this state of affairs good or bad, but there it is. Whether it can be reversed is impossible to say, although I am doubtful. Personally, I hope Europe will learn from the UK, where secular space developed hand-in-hand with religious toleration over the period 1688-1889, when the last religious tests were abolished in Scotland (although some sectarianism remains in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and there is residual anti-Roman Catholic legislation in relation to the monarchy), and where there is a long tradition of immigration. This offers a more flexible model for secularism than that which emerged from the anti-clerical conflicts in France and elsewhere, and which has now succeeded in creating the first “theo-con” martyr.

Callum Brown, author of the excellent book The Death of Christian Britain, responded to Preston’s Guardian piece the next day:

Peter Preston is wrong in his religious analysis (Britain, not the US, is the odd one out, November 8). All the evidence points to the emergence of a common European secular culture in the last 40 years, which now encompasses Scandinavia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Iberia. This is marked by an unparalleled decline of churchgoing, formal religious affiliation, belief in God and the Christian afterlife, as well as by increasing secularisation of the state and of personal identity. Former Catholic and staunch Protestant heartlands do not seem immune, and we can see secularisation gathering speed in Poland, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Nor is it right to dismiss Britons (or Europeans) as morally unstirrable. The re-moralisation of Europe around postcolonial sensibilities and environmental issues displays a new focus on respect for the body and the planet as the intellectual basis for moral development.

Callum Brown
Professor of religious and cultural history
University of Dundee

This seems to me a sensible assessment.

******

The Tablet also has an interesting titbit on Buttliglione:

Buttiglione, 56, is a friend of Pope John Paul II and father of four daughters. He is also a member of Communion and Liberation, a charismatic movement that aims to integrate faith and life through insisting on the centrality and real presence of Christ.

Communion and Liberation (CL) was founded in 1954 by Msgr. Luigi Giussani (although the name dates from 1969). CL is one of the new Catholic movements criticised by Gordon Urquhart in his The Pope’s Armada (1995); interestingly, he notes that CL appealed to “many disillusioned defectors from the extreme left” (p. 161); that may not apply to Buttiglione, but it makes the term “theo-con” perhaps even more appropriate for the general trend.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Good old Wayback:

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Introduction

Some say that the ancient world ended in 529, when Justinian closed down the Platonic school in Athens and the last pagan philosophers took refuge in Persia. Although this was an authoritarian move, it would have had the broad support of the masses (at least, those who heard about it) who had, in the decades previously, hacked to death the philosopher Hypatia and taken to burning down synagogues. According to one quote I dug out:

The fall of philosophy…was naturally succeeded by the darkness of delusion and ignorance; by the spirit of wild fanaticism and intolerant zeal; by the loss of courage and virtue; and by the final dissolution of the empire of the world.

This is, of course, a rather romantic simplification, but it comes to mind as I survey recent reports about the political manipulation of education in the USA.

Part One

First, the teaching of Creationism in schools has been making political headway in at least six states. The strategy is not so much to teach the specific ideas put forward by Creationism (the world-wide flood etc) as to generally raise doubts about evolutionary theory. One way this is achieved is by bringing in “Intelligent Design” (ID), the idea that evolution (and more widely, the universe) is so unlikely that what science takes to be natural phenomena must have been in truth designed. As the designer is not specified (is it God or some kind of alien?), this cannot be accused of being religion. Although ID has only so far produced one peer-reviewed scientific article (and that under questionable circumstances), the Creationists use the democratic-populist impulse in American culture (this controversy is marginal in Europe) to argue a) that if a decent number of lay people are convinced of certain arguments against evolution, those arguments should be taught as science, whatever their quality and regardless of what better-educated scientists might think; and b) that using scientific criteria to decide what should be taught as science is actually a denial of free speech. They would use different words, but that’s what it amounts to.

Back in 2002, Georgia decided to add anti-evolutionary stickers to its science text-books. These are now subject to a court case, and are part of a wider campaign. The AP reports more recently:

First, Georgia’s education chief tried to take the word “evolution” out of the state’s science curriculum. Now a suburban Atlanta county is in federal court over textbook stickers that call evolution “a theory, not a fact.”…The stickers say evolution should be “critically considered.” Earlier this year, science teachers howled when state Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed a new science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time.”

That proposal was dropped, at least. The inclusion of ID Creationism in Goergia is charactered as a case of “academic freedom” by Kelly Hollowell at WorldNetDaily: “academic freedom” being term much abused these days.

In 2003 the St Paul Pioneer Press  reported from Minnesota that

Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke will ask the committee to consider an amendment that Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, tried unsuccessfully to add to the federal No Child Left Behind law. It says that when controversial topics — such as biological evolution — come up in the classroom, the curriculum should help students understand other views as well.

One of the alternatives Santorum has written about is “intelligent design,” which says an organism’s complexity is evidence of an other-worldly designer. The amendment passed the Senate and was included in a conference committee’s report, but was struck from the final version of the law.

In the following September Yecke described the situation to the Princeton Union-Eagle

The science standards include nothing about religious creationalism [sic] – that God, not random events, guided the path of development.

“You can’t teach creationalism [sic] in the classroom,” said Yecke, citing a 1987 Supreme Court decision.

Still, local school districts are free to teach the idea of intelligent design, she said.

As long God is kept as merely implicit, of course. Yecke also has strong views on history teaching, as discussed below.

Meanwhile, in March this year the Ohio Board of Education decided to include intelligent design in its science curriculum. As The Cincinnati Enquirer reported just before the decision:

On Tuesday, the Ohio Board of Education is expected to approve model science lessons – including a 10th-grade biology lesson with a critical look at the theory of evolution…”There are some people who are so worried about students inquiring as to how much we know and don’t know about the theory of evolution that they would rather have students not question it,” said state board member Deborah Owens Fink, an associate professor of marketing and international business at the University of Akron.

“Professor of marketing”, no less!

In Pennsylvania, the Dover school board (a district of 2,800 students) has drawn the same conclusion. One dissenting board member made a statement reported in The York Dispatch complaining that:

I was referred to as unpatriotic, and my religious beliefs were questioned.

The push for ID, which now means the ID book Of Pandas and People will be included as a reference text in Dover schools, has been led by William Buckingham. Quoted by the AP, Buckingham said that he was a Creationist but that the decision

is not an attempt to impose my views on anyone else

His reasoning, of course, is that he is merely asking for equal time for his Creationist ideas to be taught alongside the scientific ideas that he finds objectionable for religious reasons.

Moving on to Wisconsin (the AP yet again):

School officials have revised the science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

Members of Grantsburg’s school board believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

As with Hollowell in relation to Georgia, Agape Press sees this is as issue of “academic freedom”.

The situation in Texas was considered yesterday. In that state, Terri Leo has been trying to get ID on the school syllabus, assisted by a lobby group called Texans for Better Science Education.

Part Two

But Creationism is only one battleground. As PZ Myers pointed out recently:

It must be sad and hard to be a textbook in Texas.

Last year, the school board was trying to cut evolution out of them.

The year before, they were removing references to pollution, global warming, and overpopulation.

Oh, and now the phrase “married partners” is not to be used, because it’s too general and could include gay couples.

And health/sex ed books contain no mention of contraception. At all.

Also, as Salon reported a few months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry gets his ideas for school financing from religious-right financier James Leininger.

However, it’s not all going the way of religious conservatives. The Organisation of American Historians takes us back to Minnesota, where

the standardized tests teachers are now required to give often serve as a vehicle for shaping the content of the history they teach to their students. As the article by Sara Evans and Lisa Norling of the University of Minnesota found elsewhere in this issue of the OAH Newsletter describes, the struggle that developed in their state when an alliance of extreme conservative and fundamentalist Christian activists was empowered by Minnesota’s acting Commissioner of Education to reshape the state’s social studies curriculum. A highly active group of K-12 teachers allied with many parents and members of the university’s history department and defeated this attempt to impose a single ideological pattern on every schoolroom in the state where history was taught.

Evans and Norling report that:

Under the guidance of Commissioner Cheri Yecke, her handpicked “citizens committee” of parents, teachers, school administrators, and political operatives produced a first draft of social studies standards in a very brief time (about three weeks)… When we read the DOE proposed standards, we too were shocked by its factual errors, omissions, evident biases, explicit political and cultural agenda, and its general sloppiness, inconsistencies, and incoherence. We were particularly distressed – and inspired to action – [typo corrected here – RB] by the obvious rejection of both the expertise of professional scholars (who were conspicuously excluded from the process) and of several generations worth of scholarship and the knowledge it has produced.

They found

serious omissions, such as the failure to consider the impact of slavery as an institution on American society, the total absence of mention of any rights movement of the twentieth century other than the civil rights movement, and the almost complete omission of Latin America from “world” history. We pointed out multiple examples of misleading or unbalanced details in U.S. history, government, and citizenship: for instance, the persistent conflation of the founding of our nation in 1776 with the framing of our government in 1789, the Mexican-American War as one optional example of westward expansion; and attributing the fall of communism single-handedly to Ronald Reagan. In a curriculum with strong emphasis on individual leaders only three Native Americans were listed: Pocahontas, Squanto, and Sacagawea; and of the twelve women mentioned by name throughout the proposed standards, not one was principally known for her advocacy for women’s rights.

Yecke allegedly responded that these complaints amounted to a “hate-America agenda”.

Part Three

Moving on to higher education, the OAH also notes that:

Second, foreign historians, students, and researchers are now subject to interminable review if they apply for entry to the U.S. or for renewal of green cards. The resulting delays have often been enough to deter scholars from taking up or seeking to retain positions in American institutions. In the last year alone, foreign students (especially from China) have overwhelmingly applied to other countries, rather than to the U.S. (with especially severe consequences for the sciences). The State Department’s recent action revoking the visa of the eminent Muslim scholar from Switzerland, Tariq Ramadan, and preventing him from taking up teaching duties at Notre Dame University, has attracted especially widespread attention.

As I posted at the time, even smearmeister Daniel Pipes could only come up with a very lame “worry” that Ramadan could not prove he is not secretly working for al-Qaeda. The battle against Middle Eastern studies has been going on for some time, as Salon reported a year ago, with Tom DeLay claiming that “academic freedom” really means freedom from having to hear anything critical of Israel. Just recently in New York Joseph Massad has been placed under investigation at Columbia University – not after any students made complaints to university authorities, but after a campaign from The New York Sun and Rep. Anthony Weiner. Massad’s totally unambiguous rejection of anti-Semitism (the vice of which he is unsurprisingly tarred with) and his position can be read here. And, of course, the academic study of the Middle East is also hampered by law. As The New York Times reported in February (reposted here):

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of “camera-ready copies of manuscripts” is allowed.

Well, it may be that reports of the Death of Enlightenment have been rather exaggerated, but it’s certainly not in very good health at the moment…

(Some links snagged from The Panda’s Thumb, Pharyngula, AntiEvolution, Christianity Today Weblog, and the History News Network)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

PZ Myers at Pharynluga launches a philippic against Terri Leo, who sits on the Board of Education in Texas. Leo has come to international attention over her efforts to have the theory of evolution “balanced” by creationist criticisms of the theory in school textbooks. However, that’s only part of her agenda:

She’s been working like a maniac to gut textbooks; she’s even tried to get publishers to add little “facts”, like “Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use, and suicide.” She’s a perfect example of anti-science, anti-intellectual, intolerant bigotry, and yet there she is, on the state board of education. That’s like hearing that Richard Dawkins has been elected by the College of Cardinals to the papacy, or that the new head of the NIH is Bluto Blutarski. She just doesn’t belong there.

Unsurprisingly, Leo is a senior figure in the very disturbing Republican Party of Texas. Her position on evolution teaching was laid out in a statement included in the minutes of a State Board of Education meeting held last November:

The State Board of Education has been evaluating whether current biology textbooks meet state standards for accuracy in their presentation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Numerous Texas scientists, educators, and students have asked that the SBOE insist the biology textbooks comply with the state law by correcting well-known factual errors and by presenting both the scientific strengths and the scientific weaknesses to Darwinian theory; which is spelled out in TEKS (3)(A).  This reasonable request, which is merely asking that the law be met, has elicited a torrent of personal abuse and misinformation by those lobbying to teach Darwin’s theory uncritically.  All I’m asking is that the students learn all the scientific evidence they need to assess Darwinian theory, not just the evidence that happens to support it.  Much peer reviewed scientific literature has been documented to the existence of many problems with current evolutionary theory and with the textbooks’ presentation of that theory.

The law of the land also supports this approach, as does our national education policy.  In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards vs. Aguillar, the controlling legal authority on how to teach origin questions, that state legislatures could require and state boards could require teaching scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories.  Last year in the conference report of the No Child Left Behind, Congress expressed its support for greater openness in science instruction, citing biological evolution as the key example.  Teaching both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory not only interests students, it teaches them to weigh evidence, a skill needed in scientific reasoning.  As Charles Darwin said himself in Origin of the Species, a fair result can only be obtained by balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

The most eminent scientist to testify on behalf of the textbooks was Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize Laureate in physics from The University of Texas.  In response to questioning from the board, he made it clear that in supporting evolution, he didn’t have anything to say about the origin of life.  He further elaborated “that it may be on any given planet the chance that the conditions would be right for life to start up and that life will actually get started as extremely low.”  However, textbooks under consideration do not adequately reflect his clear, specific, and highly qualified testimony.  Tell students the truth; give them all the scientific evidence.

There are three major publishers in the high school biology market.  Two of them, Holt and Glencoe, I believe do conform to Texas law and our high standards. These standards were clearly spelled out to publishers in the Proclamation 2001, in the Question and Answer, in the SBOE Operating Rules, and in the board’s documented intent in developing TEKS (3)(A).  Prentice Hall has made no attempt to fulfill this requirement.  Therefore, I cannot support Prentice Hall’s biology book, as well as any other book that has disregarded TEKS (3)(A), our own state standard.  I believe these books cannot be placed on the conforming list of adoptions.  Thank you Madam Chair.

Leo’s appropriation of Weinberg is rather odd. Here’s what Weinberg actually said in context:

As I understand it, many who want to put alternative theories into our textbooks argue that, although that may be true, we don’t know that that’s all that happens, that there is not some intelligent design that also assists the process of evolution. But that’s the wrong question. We can never know that there isn’t something beyond our theories. And that’s not just true with regard to evolution. That’s true with regard to everything…What we have to do is keep comparing what we observe with our theories and keep verifying that the theories work, trying to explain more and more. That’s what’s happened with evolution and it continues to be successful. There is not one thing that is known to be inexplicable through evolution by natural selection, which is not the same as saying that everything has been explained, because it never will be. The same applies to the weather or the solar system or what have you…

You’re not doing your job if you let a question like the validity of evolution through natural selection go to the students, anymore than a judge is doing his job or her job if he or she allows the question of witchcraft to go to the jury. And why this particular issue of evolution? Why not the round Earth or Newton’s theory or Copernicus’ [theory], the Earth goes around the sun? Well, I think it’s rather disingenuous to say that this is simply because there’s a real scientific conflict here, because there is no more of a scientific conflict than with those issues.

As for Leo’s “aha!” moment, in which she enlists Weinberg for her cause:

Then you raise an entirely different point, which is the point about the origin of life. I didn’t have anything to say about the origin of life. I don’t believe that anyone knows what is the probability, given certain environment, that life will arise. It is not something that we know really how to calculate.

Leo rightly quotes Weinberg for saying that the probability of life arising may be low. But just as she ignores his distinction between the issue of initial origins and the process of evolution, so she fails to tell her audience that Weinberg qualified his statement rather radically:

If you have that many planets, then there’s a good chance that life will form on one of them. And the people on that planet will look around and say, “Gee, aren’t we lucky?”

Board member Mavis B. Knight tried to counter Leo’s assertions by asking for an article by Alan D Gishlick attacking the creationist book Icons of Evolution to be included on the record.

More background on Leo is provided by the San Antonio Current, in an article from last year:

During her 2002 campaign, Leo was endorsed by the far-right Concerned Women of America, which describes itself as being built on “prayer and action,” and working to “bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” She also earned the seal of approval from Rick Scarborough, co-founder of Vision America, whose mission is “to promote Biblical values back into every aspect of our public arena.”

According to Leo’s campaign contribution filings (she was one of only five members to file on-line), she accepted contributions from fellow board members Geraldine Miller and David Bradley — $4,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Leo also received $500 from Robert Schoolfield, a far-right Austinite who ran for the board, but lost in the primary to Cynthia Thornton. The Texas Observer called him “the Christian Right’s anointed candidate” and during his campaign, Schoolfield spoke out against homosexuality and supported school vouchers.

But Schoolfield’s campaign unraveled after he became entangled in a controversy over his campaign contributions to a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, who upheld that state’s voucher laws. The Wisconsin elections board ruled that Schoolfield and others’ out-of-state contributions were illegal. Dogged by controversy, Schoolfield lost his bid for the board, but found his voice in Terri Leo.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Tyndale House has announced plans to publish a novel by Hank Hanegraaff presenting the shocking view that the Book of Revelation is actually about first-century Christianity rather than current events in the twenty-first century. This has provoked a delicious quote from Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, who also publishes with Tyndale:

They are going to take the money we made for them and promote this nonsense

And LaHaye knows a thing or two about promoting nonsense. Explains the Dallas News:

The Last Disciple, the first of at least three books planned, depicts the Roman emperor, Nero, as “the beast.” In the book, Christians in Rome and Jerusalem are suffering through the Tribulation. Nero is trying to find the Apostle John’s letter (the Book of Revelation) and destroy it. To survive, the early Christians must decipher a mysterious code. (The code for Nero’s name is the number 666, regarded by many as the mark of the Antichrist.)

Sound farfetched?

Maybe. But scholars of eschatology, the branch of theology dealing with the end of the world, note that biblical references to the end times are almost always ambiguous, highly symbolic and subject to widely varying interpretations.

“Farfetched”? In actual fact, the “nonsense” LaHaye objects to has been the standard scholarly understanding of the text for decades, if not even longer. The Nero = 666 interpretation is even included in the notes of the New Jerusalem Bible. Hanegraaff’s position, however, is not based on higher-critical Biblical scholarship. For example, although his approach also places the prophecies in the Book of Daniel as having been fulfilled in the ancient world rather than being still to come, he clings to the fundamentalist claim that the text was written before those events (and so is a miraculous book that proves the existence of God) when serious scholarship places Daniel in the second century BCE. Instead, he is, to some extent at least, a preterist: one who believes that the Bible is truly prophetic, but that most of the Bible’s prophecies have been fulfilled already. This interpretation is also held by, among others, RC Sproul.

This is, though, a new departure for Tyndale. In his autobiography, Kenneth Taylor, Tyndale’s founder, states that the Six-Day War “seemed to be a clear act of God in helping his ancient race to whom the promise was given of repopulating the desert” (page 246) and long before Left Behind Taylor’s premillennialism led to the publication of Hal Lindsey-esque books like Israel, Act III by Richard Wolff. However, current vice-president Ron Beers says that

As a Christian publisher, we want to represent a diversity of viewpoints…There is nothing strange about Tyndale selling both views. There are a variety of perspectives on the end times. Some people had a problem with the theology in the Left Behind books.

Well, the theology was on some people’s list, along with the anti-intellectualism, political paranoia and crap writing…

Perhaps another reason why Tyndale has turned to Hanegraaff is simply because his view is now becoming more popular. LaHaye’s premillennialism made sense under the shadow of the Cold War, and afterwards during the (apparent) liberalism of the Clinton years. But times have changed since the first Left Behind novel appeared almost ten years ago. With Bush in the White House, US forces in Iraq, cultural conservatives besieging media and academic institutions they accuse of “bias” (an accusation that encompasses the teaching of evolutionary theory), Falwell proclaiming a revolution, and the rise of a postmodern age of religious-identity politics, visions of being raptured away from an unholy world may well appear less attractive than the idea that the world can be captured for Christianity. To be sure, we still have Mike Evans heading up Amazon bestseller lists with an apocalyptic take on current events, but Evans spices up his premillennialism with extensive anti-Arab racism and a portrait of Israel as an ally against the Muslim hordes. Perhaps readers are enjoying these elements while deciding that the rapture is postponed.

Peculiarly (or not), although LaHaye is offended by Tyndale daring to publish books that disagree with his theology, he has no problem with being promoted by Kensington Books, which does a nice line in gay erotica. But I suppose Kensington is helping him move into the mainstream, so it’s best to keep quiet.

*************

On a side note, Hanegraaff’s co-writer (as with so many other Christian novels, one suspects the famous Christian provides the name, while the less-famous one actually does all the work) is Sigmund Brouwer. Like LaHaye’s co-author Jerry Jenkins, Brouwer is a professional writer with over a hundred titles in adventure, science-fiction, and children’s books. He has also published The Unrandom Universe: The Latest Scientific Discoveries Will Strengthen Your Faith, which adopts what looks like a theistic evolutionist perspective. One wonders how this fits with Hanegraaff’s young-earth creationism and his creationist tome The Face That Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution.

(Dallas News link from Christianity Today)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Jack Wheeler hits a new low for WorldNet Daily:

The Jewish Talmud makes the following observation:

There is no beauty like Jerusalem, no wealth like Rome, no depravity like Arabia.

This was written in the 3rd century A.D. – three hundred years before the Arabs embraced Muhammad’s Islam. But neither the adoption of Islam nor all the intervening centuries since has decreased the addiction Arab men have to pederasty.

And what’s the evidence? Exhibit A: Yasser Arafat:

Arab pederasty was personified in Yasser Arafat, one of the vilest human beings to ever infest the earth. During the Cold War, Arafat was a frequent guest of Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, who would put him up in his palace in Bucharest. Always included in Arafat’s retinue was a selection of young boys. What Arafat didn’t know was that Ceaucescu’s secret police, the Securitatae, would covertly film his bedroom escapades. The Israeli intel agency Mossad has copies.

This follows on from a previous WND article by Aaron Klein, “Does Arafat Have AIDS?” There it was revealed that

Ion Pacepa, who was deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence under the Ceaucescu regime and who defected to the West in 1978, says in his memoirs the Romania government bugged Arafat and had recordings of the Arab leader in orgies with his security detail.

Various Israeli security sources have in the past suggested publicly Arafat might be homosexual. They’ve claimed Arafat’s former personal driver – a Mossad double agent – used to find teenage boys to bring back to the PLO leader. His wife, Suha, mostly lived abroad and rarely saw her husband.

Wheeler adds, with great subtlety:

Yasser Arafat was the Hitler of Palestinian Arabs.

I think I prefer Edward Said’s “Papa Doc of Palestine” description.

Wheeler likes to be known as “Indiana Jones of the Right”, having led a double life of philosophy teaching and of adventure, helping insurgents in “Soviet colonies” in the 1980s. World O’Crap recently noted:

you can get some of his mind-stretching insights at NewsMax (like the famous one where he scratches out the eyes of Peggy Noonan for saying mean things about her fellow Reagan speech writers); at the Moonie Times (for instance,  one in which he brags of having first outted Hillary Clinton as a bisexual in 1993); and CounterPunch (in which he argues that Janet Reno is America’s Saddam Hussein).

CounterPunch? Peculiar, but there it is. According to Rightweb, Wheeler founded the Freedom Research Foundation (FRF) in 1984, with help from Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and he has been involved with various Central American countries, Afghanistan, and Angola. An article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic (only available to subscribers, but a bootleg can be read here) gives more detail, and explains how Wheeler got funding from the Reason Foundation and Lew Lehrman to explore links with anti-Communist fighters, support for whom became “the Reagan Doctrine”:

Wheeler invited anti-communist rebel leaders from Nicaragua, Laos, and Afghanistan to Jamba, Angola, the headquarters of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita). There, Lehrman gathered his guests and had them sign a communiqué declaring “our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and … our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from the Soviet imperialists.”… Savimbi had become the poster child for this new breed of freedom fighter.

Wheeler, of course, was getting into bed with characters just as unsavoury as the Arafat he excoriates today:

To the credit of National Review, it published [Polish journalist Radek] Sikorski’s damning indictment of unita, including allegations that it had burned 13 people alive… A string of Human Rights Watch reports documented that unita violated just about every section of the Geneva Conventions.

Plus:

well before the horrors of successive Afghan regimes made clear that these “freedom fighters” merely wanted to replace the totalitarianism of godless communism with the totalitarianism of Sharia, the mujahedin’s thuggish tendencies were clear to those willing to look. Take the warlord Gulbulddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin leader to receive the most American aid. As an Islamic student leader at Kabul University, he encouraged his followers to splash acid on the faces of unveiled women and fire guns at their uncovered legs. During the anti-Soviet jihad, he betrayed a similar tendency toward indiscriminate cruelty, assassinating Afghan intellectuals and Western journalists. And, as recently as last month, he ordered his followers to “cut off the hands of the foreign meddlers.”

Foer concludes:

…When I visited Jack Wheeler, he showed me the books on his desk. They included Sleeping With the Devil, Robert Baer’s polemic against Saudi Arabia, and David Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. He picked up one and told me, “It’s amazing how similar Islam is to Marxism. I mean, it’s the same thing all over again.” This has become a standard interpretation on the right and has logically led to talk of reapplying the Reagan Doctrine. But the map looks a lot different now than when Wheeler first considered the possibilities of global antiSoviet revolution. Not so many counter-Islamist insurgencies burn across the globe. So reviving the Reagan Doctrine could require digging deeper into the bag of opposition groups for rebels that have even less popular support or even worse track records than their ’80s analogs.

*********

A couple of footnotes:

1. Thank you to a commentator for finding the actual passage of The Talmud quoted by Wheeler: this is from the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, also known in English as The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan. It’s actually from the sixth century, and is extra-canonical. I have no idea whether Wheeler has used the passage in context.

R. Nathan said: “There is no love such as the love of the Torah; there is no wisdom such as the wisdom of manners; there is no beauty such as the beauty of Jerusalem; there are no riches such as the riches of Modea; there is no strength such as the strength of Persia; there is no adultery such as the adultery of the Arabians; there is no haughtiness such as the haughtiness of Elam; there is no hypocrisy such as the hypocrisy of Babylon, as it is written [Zech. v. 11]: ‘And he said unto me, To build for it a house in the land of Shinar’; and there is no witchcraft such as the witchcraft of Egypt.”

2. A lengthy cached interview with Wheeler can be read here.

3. Ion Pacepa, the source of the Arafat-homosexuality accusation is a particularly shady character. He has been the toast of the neo-conservatives for some years, since he “revealed” that basically anything bad that was ever said against the USA or Israel was the result of Communist propaganda. Back in March Joe Conason noted that the National Review was carrying

a weird article by Romania’s former Communist spy chief, in which he insinuates that Kerry, and anyone else who talked about atrocities in Vietnam, was really an instrument of KGB propaganda. (It is remarkable to see a “conservative” magazine publish a smear written by a man who once facilitated the atrocities of the Ceausescu regime.) The essay by Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the West in 1978, is titled “Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric,” and claims that his testimony about the war in 1971 “sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era.”

Pacepa also claims that Russia has hidden Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, since the Soviet Union provided them in the first place. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave at UPI, Pacepa is still wanted in Romania and remains undercover.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Hindu Astrology introduces us to one of their “noted astrologers”:

Vinod Kumar Gupta a hidden treasure in himself is known to the astrological world for his accurate predictions…Not only as an astrologer he is also a renowned Vaastu Expert. Many big industrial houses can be credited to his account. He can draw the horoscope of the house/factory from which he can make predictions and suggest some remedial measures for the malefic of teh [sic] planetary effects.

A list of 19 past predictions is given to prove his occult powers. For some reason, however, his latest prophecy (reported in Express India on October 23) is absent:

A city-based astrologer has predicted that Kerry would replace Bush in the next US presidential elections.

Vinod Kumar Gupta…has predicted that Kerry will be elected new president in the elections to be held in November. According to Gupta, in the annual horoscope of President Bush, mercury is in the eighth house from July 2004 to July 2005 which would affect his prospects in these elections.

While, John Kerry, claimed Gupta, has Moon and Mars in the fourth house in the annual horoscope up to December 2004 which gives him a gain in popularity and victory in elections.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

As the US election gets underway, one neo-Pentecostal “prophet” makes a shameless bid for the limelight, according to Charisma:

Prominent Pastor Issues ‘Emergency’ Call to Prayer for Today’s Elections

Emergency? Yes – completely unexpectedly, Bush’s rule is being challenged!

Dutch Sheets, who has pastored Springs Harvest Fellowship in Colorado Springs, Colo., for 12 years, said the Holy Spirit had not led him to issue a call to prayer for the elections until last Thursday.

“That began to change this morning, as I sensed clearly that the warfare over this election went to another level — big time,” Sheets said on his Web site (www.dutchsheets.org). “As it was in 2000, it is an all-out war in the spirit realm for the soul of this nation, and I sense in my spirit that we have not yet broken through into victory.

Apparently, they are also voting in the spirit realm, and the voting demons (Sheets is close to Peter Wagner, as if you couldn’t guess) may upset God’s own candidacy. The prophet goes on to warn us:

“Do not make the fatal mistake of laying the results of this election solely on the will and sovereignty of God,” Sheets said. “We must not allow a faulty theology that simply says, ‘We have asked God to intervene, the rest is up to Him,’ to give us a false sense of security. Sometimes asking is all that is necessary, sometimes not. In this battle it absolutely is not.”

However, the fearless latter-day Elijah is mindful of his tax status and quickly adds that

his last-minute call to prayer is not a partisan issue. “It is simply a righteousness issue,” said Sheets, who changed his schedule and traveled to Washington, D.C., to pray for the elections this past weekend. “God must have a man in office who seeks His face. If all of us do our part, we will prevail in this election and see America take another turn toward righteousness and revival.”

No, no, not partisan at all. Which was why back in 2000 Sheets warned that (as reported on Belief.net):

If there is not enough prayer, God’s person will lose the election and the turning of this nation [toward God] will be drastically delayed.

Given that Sheets seems to have been quite happy with Bush over the past four years, no doubt those who believe that Sheets speaks with the very authority of God Himself will draw their own conclusion about which man God wants in office. All perfectly above board.

(By the way, Sheets was my source linking Doug Giles to Mell Winger, who is also based in Colorado, at Ted Haggard’s megachurch. Sheets praised Giles’s “powerful evangelistic ministry”.)

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »